"There is only one power that determines the course of history . . . the power of ideas." — Ayn Rand

Sunday, June 5, 2011

What is the "Key" to Job Creation?

"Creating jobs is the key to making long-term deficit reduction achievable and providing the relief working people need. An investment in transit and other infrastructure will create jobs and keep our communities safe and thriving. And we need to lay the foundation for long-term economic growth by investing in clean energy, education and job training."

As tiresome as it is, the repulsive and destructive arguments presented in this article must be countered as often as they are made. In this article by two top AFL-CIO officials, entitled Rep. Ryan's tax plan moves us backward, labor's leaders propose to perpetuate a trend that is moving us back to pre-American days of Imperial Government.

I've left the following comments:

zemack May 02, 2011 at 8:13PM

What is the source of real jobs?

Jobs are created by the person(s) whose intellectual energy and ambitions exceed his physical capacity to realize them. He then needs to hire one (or more) persons to help him transform his ideas - his intellectual labor - into useful products and services. The more productive his intellectual labor is, the more people are willing to buy (i.e., trade for) his product, meaning the more people he must hire. The only thing that stands in his way is coercive interference – i.e., government regulations, taxes, etc. What is required for the job creators to flourish? A government that protects his rights to think and act upon his own judgement, and his right to his earnings, every bit as strongly as it protects those described as “working families”. The job creator – i.e., the businessman – simply requires laissez-faire, or freedom – along with his employees, customers, and everyone else.

What the alleged representatives of the workers advocate is something entirely different, however. It can be summed up with this analogy: If I were to embark on a string of convenience store stick-ups, then use the loot to put an addition onto my or anyone’s house – to “invest” in the homebuilding industry – I will have been said to have “created” construction jobs. As ridiculous as this sounds, once you cut through the socialist/Orwellian double-speak above, that is exactly what is advocated on a national scale in this article.

In the name of creating jobs, we are presented with a worn-out old scheme to punish free production and trade, transfer still more wealth and power to a bureaucratic/political governmental elite, empower politically-connected special interests, force more and more people into dependence on and therefor slavery to the state – and to make actual, original productive job creation ever more difficult. Socialist governments can’t create jobs, or wealth. Socialist governments forcibly transfer wealth, and that’s it.

I will not defend or criticize the Republican plan. Their track record of reigning in galloping statism is horrific, to put it mildly. What I will say is this: Socialism in all of its manifestations (including Keynesian welfare statism) has proven economically unworkable, and immoral because it violates every individual’s right to manage and live his own life. What’s needed is something the GOP is currently too cowardly to advocate: Phase out and end government’s involvement in such areas as retirement (Social Security), healthcare (ObamaCare, Medicare), charity (Medicaid, SCHIP, etc). The government has mismanaged those horrendously, bringing America to the verge of banana republic status. Return power in those areas literally to the people – the people who earn the money before it is confiscated. Replace the graduated income tax with a flat, low-rate tax, fair and simple. End the insanity of trying to spend the economy into prosperity. What can’t work in your personal life, can’t work on any scale.

These are for starters. The fundamental issue is statism (the individual’s life belongs to the state) vs. freedom. By using the government-created economic crisis to rationalize expanded government, Mr. Trumka and Mr. Wowkanech are following a hundred-year-old pattern. Labor’s leaders choose statism, not “working families”. They do job seekers great harm by attacking job generators, denigrated as “Wall Street and the rich”, and the economic freedom a dynamic economy requires.

2 comments:

Mike Kevitt
said...

It is important for everybody to realise that your proposals are for starters. I mention, particularly, your proposal about taxes.

Beyond starters, moving to where all is said and done and made right, we won't have taxes. Government funding will all be voluntary, that is, by the choice of all funding parties, for the proper service, only, of government, while everybody will receive that service, but only that service, from government.

Sounds like dreaming to some, no doubt. But, the means are all around, in everyboby, with wealth and luxury to spare. It's a potential of human nature.

Going beyond starters will begin tapping that potential. When all is said and done, it will be sufficiently tapped.

The ever-more suffocating welfare state arrived over many decades in small, often imperceptible steps (except to the philosophically astute, a tiny minority, if that, on the right). But each step moved the ball toward collectivism, thanks to the statists’ ideological consistency and the conservatives’ compromising cowardice. Likewise, rolling it back will take a period of incremental steps, essentially reversing the process. Reforms like universal parental school choice through tax credits, health savings accounts, and a flat tax that unequivocally move the ball towards more individual freedom will allow pro-capitalists to educate the public on the virtues of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for still more pro-freedom reforms.

Undoing the regulatory welfare state requires the Right to be rigidly consistent in upholding individualism as the moral ideal, even as it makes political compromises in the process. A fully free laissez-faire capitalist society will take an extended period of philosophical education, leaving political incrementalism as the only viable option for capitalist activists. But it can be a winning strategy longer term.

About Me

Greetings and welcome to my blog. My name is Michael A. (Mike) LaFerrara. I sometimes use the pen or "screen" name "Mike Zemack" or "Zemack" in online activism, such as posted comments on articles. “Zemack” stands for the first letters of the names of my six grandchildren. I was born in 1949 in New Jersey, U.S.A., where I retired from a career in the plumbing, building controls, and construction industries, and still reside with my wife of 45 years. The purpose of my blog is the discussion of a wide range of topics relating to human events from the perspective of Objectivism, the philosophy of reason, rational self-interest, and Americanism originated by Ayn Rand.

As Rand observed: “The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher.” I am certainly not the philosopher. But neither am I a field agent, or general. I am a foot soldier in that Objectivist army that fights for an individualist society in which every person can live in dignified sovereignty, by his own reasoned judgment, for his own sake, in that state of peaceful coexistence with his fellow man that only capitalist political and economic freedom can provide. While I am a fully committed Objectivist, my opinions are based on my own understanding of Objectivism, and should not be taken as definitive “Objectivist positions.” For the full story of my journey toward Objectivism, see my Introduction.

One final introductory note: I strongly recommend Philosophy, Who Needs it, which highlights the inescapable importance of philosophy in every individual's life. I can be reached at mal.atlas@comcast.net. Thanks, Mike LaFerrara.

Recommended Essays/Videos

Quotes I Like

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.—Francisco d'Anconia

I love getting older...I get to grow up and learn things. Madalyn, 5 years old, Montesorri student, and my grand-daughter

The best thing one can do for the poor is to not become one of them. Author Unknown

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Francis Bacon

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Ronald Reagan

Thinking is hard work. If it weren't, more people would do it. Henry Ford

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. Ayn Rand